Grasshopper Jungle

I went to the edge of the roof, to the top of the small ladder we’d used to get up there.

“Shann,” I said. “I just want to make sure she’s okay.”

Robby didn’t answer.

Words like okay can mean all kinds of things.

Robby knew enough that saying anything might nail down a definition of okay that wasn’t what either one of us wanted to hear.

The Explorer was dark and quiet.

Shann was still asleep.

We hadn’t been gone for more than twenty minutes, even if time seemed to slow to a crawl now.

Across the street, Satan’s Pizza winked. The fluorescent tubes inside the sign made an audible hiss like a dying wasp when it went dark.

Robby climbed down the trapdoor.

I followed him.

HUNGRY JACK

ON WEEKENDS AND over the summers I earned money doing jobs for Johnny McKeon at his From Attic to Seller Consignment Store. Johnny felt obligated to me because I was Shann’s boyfriend.

Usually, the jobs required cleaning the store.

Secondhand stores are like vacuum cleaners to the world: They suck in everybody’s shit.

History shows that, like Ealing, when towns are dying, the last things to catch the plague are the secondhand and liquor stores.

Johnny McKeon was on top of the world.

Sometimes, Johnny would receive new consignments out in Grasshopper Jungle, and then leave me to go through and sort boxes, unroll and sweep off rugs, and clean out the drawers in dressers and nightstands.

I found a lot of condoms and Bibles in them.

Johnny told me I could do whatever I wanted with those things.

I threw the Bibles in the dumpster.

Robby and I climbed down the ladder. It deposited us, like visiting aliens, into a common back room that connected Tipsy Cricket Liquors with From Attic to Seller.

The ladder was attached by metal brackets to a plasterboard wall where the electrical panel box for the store was located. I’d seen the ladder there plenty of times. I had even noticed the Roof Access↑ sign posted on the wall with an arrow pointing up, as though you might not know where a roof could be, direction-wise.

I never thought about going up on the roof of the mall before I went there with Robby.

On the other side of the wall was the shop’s toilet. It was such a small space that you would be looking straight across at your own face in the mirror, and could reach the soap and paper towel dispensers and wash your hands in the sink while you were sitting on the toilet.

Ollie Jungfrau could never take a shit in there.

There was a sign on the door that said: No Public Restroom

Everyone knew the public restroom was at the launderette, or between the dumpster and the couch in Grasshopper Jungle if you couldn’t hold it that far.

There was a homeless guy who’d come riding through on his rickety old bicycle about once per week or so. His bicycle was always teetering, precisely and ridiculously balanced with huge bundles and bags strapped to any available rusted crossbar. Robby and I called him Hungry Jack, but we never asked him his name.

Hungry Jack didn’t have any front teeth.

Hungry Jack fought in Vietnam.

When he came through, Hungry Jack would stop and climb into the dumpster, dig around for things.

Robby and I caught him taking a shit one time, between the dumpster and the couch.

I have read that the human memory for smells is one of the most powerful bits of data that can be etched into our brains. Although it seemed so foreign to me, being inside From Attic to Seller in the middle of the night, the smell of the place was entirely familiar. The shop had this constant, perfumed odor of sorrow, death, abandonment, condoms, and Bible verses; that was like nothing I’d ever smelled anywhere else.

I felt as at home there as you’d have to feel, lying in your own coffin.

JOHNNY’S THINGS

“THIS WAY,” I whispered.

Robby had never set foot inside the secondhand store until that night. I’d told him about it enough times.

“This is rather scary,” Robby said.

Now Robby was speaking like a non-Ealingite.

“Do you want to get out?”

“No.”

Robby put his hand on my shoulder so he wouldn’t trip on anything. I led him out around the back counter, which was a rectangular glass case where Johnny McKeon displayed watches, jewelry, cameras, guns, and three framed insect collections.

There were only a few things in From Attic to Seller that I favored. The insects were among my most appreciated abandoned items.

One of the frames contained only butterflies. For some reason, I always found the butterflies to be boring. But the other two frames were wonders: One displayed forty-one beetles. I counted them. There were all kinds of oddities in the frame, including beetles with horns, and some nearly as large as my clenched fist. The beetles in the center were posed so their shells were open and their glassine wings spread wide.

The last frame had fifteen bugs in it. An enormous centipede curled around the bend at one corner, and a glossy black scorpion raised its stinging tail in the other. Centered against the white backing board was a vampire bat with little beaded eyes, frozen with its mouth snarled open.

“Isn’t that the coolest shit?” I asked.

Robby said, “No.”

Robby remained attached to my shoulder and I took him along the circular path around the main floor of the store.

Johnny McKeon arranged From Attic to Seller Consignment Store so that shoppers, or even people coming in to inquire about using the toilet, would have to walk a serpentine path from the front door to the back counter. His path led past every stack of clutter Johnny offered up for sale. Tipsy Cricket was different. At the liquor store, the counter was right up front, a deterrent to booze and cigarette thieves.

Johnny McKeon was a good marketer.

“I’ve never seen so much shit in my life,” Robby said.

There were nightstands on top of end tables stacked perilously on dinner tables. And every flat surface of every item of furniture was covered in figurines, place settings, ashtrays, silverware, toys, picture frames, clocks, crucifixes, candles, rock collections, pocket-knives, and too many other things for me to list.

I put the price tags on almost every one of them for Johnny, too.

Johnny McKeon made a lot of money.

As soon as one corner of the shop would empty out, it quickly filled back up again. A lot of the things came from realtors and loan agents. Some people in Ealing left behind what they couldn’t fit in the trunks and backseats of their cars when the banks took their homes.

Abandoned stuff from defeated Iowans had a way of migrating into Johnny McKeon’s hands.

Robby’s hand slipped from my shoulder.

He said, “Oops.”

Objects clinked together in the dark. Figurines fell.

“Be careful,” I said.

“Where are we going?”

“I want to see what Johnny’s hiding,” I said.

That scared Robby.

Robby grabbed my hand.

“Don’t be such a baby,” I said. “You wanted to come down here. I know where I’m going.”

Robby started to let go of my hand.

“It’s okay,” I said. I pulled Robby along by the hand like a little kid.

Johnny McKeon kept things in his private office. He never let me go in there. Johnny never let anyone go in there.

There were things Johnny wouldn’t sell. One of them was a sealed glass globe he kept on a shelf beside the office door. I was fascinated by the globe. It had been made by some of the scientists in the lab at McKeon Industries, and contained a perfectly balanced universe.

There was water, land, plants, bacteria, a species of tiny shrimp, worms, and even some translucent fish in there.

It was perfect.

It was sealed and self-sustaining.

Nothing got in and nothing got out.

My hand was wet and hot.

“You’re sweating all over me,” I said to Robby.

“Sorry.”

I turned the knob to Johnny’s office.

Of course, it was locked.

Robby bumped into me. He wasn’t paying attention and he pinned me flat against the office door with his chest.

“No go,” Robby said. “I guess we should get out of here.”

“I know where Johnny keeps the key. It isn’t very smart,” I said.

Despite his creativity at naming businesses, and his eye for marketing strategies, Johnny McKeon wasn’t that careful when it came to trusting teenage boys.

History lesson: Teenage boys watch you, even when they pretend they don’t give a shit about your life.

Johnny kept the key resting flat on the lip of the molding at the top of the door.

I pulled it down and unlocked our way into Johnny McKeon’s office, where he kept his secrets.

Robby said, “I really need a cigarette.”

TWO-HEADED BOY

WE STOOD INSIDE Johnny McKeon’s private office.

There were no windows. It was impossible to see anything in the dark.

Robby threw the switch for the office lights. I jumped when they came on.

You don’t expect things to get all bright on you when you’re nervous about doing something you’re not supposed to be doing.

Robby shrugged apologetically.

He said, “We may as well turn on the light in here. Nobody can see us.”

My heart raced, but Robby was right: Nobody could see us.

Robby shut the door to the office, which closed us in with Johnny’s things.

Johnny McKeon’s real-life horror show.

Johnny McKeon’s office smelled the same as the rest of the shop, but wasn’t nearly as cluttered. In fact, the office was rather tidy.

Rather.

I said it again.

The three walls boxing the office behind the door were lined with dark wooden shelves. Johnny had salvaged the shelves from the Ealing Public Library when it was remodeled three years before: the year we were in seventh grade.

“Holy shit,” Robby said.

Here’s why he said it: Johnny McKeon’s shelves were full of horrible, grotesque things. They were the kinds of things that no sixteen-year-old boy could tear his eyes from. And there were four sixteen-year-old-boy eyes in Johnny’s office.

One of the cases displayed another of the McKeon sealed glass globes, but this was different from the peaceful and pleasant nature-ball Johnny kept outside in the shop. The globe was about the size of a basketball, and it was propped steady atop a black lacquered stand with a brass plaque on front, as though it was some kind of trophy or shit like that. But this could not have been a trophy.

The plaque read:

MCKEON INDUSTRIES 1969 CONTAINED MI PLAGUE STRAIN 412E

Inside the globe was a festering universe.

The globe Robby and I studied held something resembling a black, folded, and coiled brain. The thing clearly was not a brain, but the wrinkled patterns on its surface made me think of one.

“This has to be like some kind of movie prop or something,” Robby said.

“Look around, Rob. All the shit in here looks real,” I said.

In fact, everything inside Johnny’s office was real, we came to find out later. It didn’t matter. Neither of us actually believed Johnny McKeon was hiding away props for horror films.

The black thing inside the globe pulsed and twitched like a beating heart. It seemed to become more animated the longer we stared at it. It was almost like a gelatinous cauliflower. Here and there on its velvet surface, a mound would rise up, like a mosquito bite, a black pimple, and then burst open at its peak.

Little volcanoes erupting.

When the pimples burst open, strands of oval globules, pale yellow pearls, coiled and twisted over the surface of the blob, then turned black and sprouted velvet hairs, dissolving back into the surface of the brain thing.

Where the glass globe with the fish, shrimp, plants, and worms outside in Johnny McKeon’s shop emanated a placid, almost hopeful aura, this thing whispered of rot and death, disease.

Robby and I could have stared at Johnny’s secret collection of things all night.

On another case was an assortment of large specimen jars.

All of them had a common etched label:

MCKEON INDUSTRIES 1969 HUMAN REPLICATION STRAND 4-VG-03

One of them contained a human head. It was a man’s head. His eyes were squinted, half open, and although they were clouded, his pupils and irises were plainly visible. He had pale blue eyes. I could even see small blood vessels in the whites of his eyes. He had a mustache. His lips were tightly pursed and frowning.

“He doesn’t look too happy,” I said.

“This has to be fake,” Robby said. “Who would keep shit like this?”

“Johnny McKeon would,” I answered. “He probably found it when the plant shut down and thought it was cool.”

“He could charge admission,” Robby said.

Another jar on the rack held a pair of human hands.

The palms were pressed together. It reminded me of the trite framed artwork depicting disembodied praying hands that hung at teenager eye level above the long urinal in the boys’ toilet at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy.

The pictures were there to remind us what good teenage boys do with their hands.

The jar beside the hands contained a penis and testicles.

The position of the jars made an artistic statement about what happened to boys who masturbate.

“That guy probably went to Curtis Crane,” Robby said.

His voice shook with nervousness.

There is nothing more deeply frightening to a sixteen-year-old boy than confronting the possibility of losing his penis.

We had to leave, but we were mesmerized.

But the thing on that particular rack that was most compelling was the jar containing a two-headed boy. It was a whole fetus, bluish in color and clay-like, tiny but fully developed.

Robby reached up and spun the jar around, making the boy pirouette for us as he floated in the zero gravity of his vacuum jar. His little legs were bowed and folded beneath him. A knotted umbilical strand corkscrewed from his round belly. One hand, its fingers so perfect, rested opened, palm up in front of the knob of his penis. The other hand was clenched in a defiant fist beside his hip. And from the boy’s shoulders sprouted two perfect heads, one tilted to the side, resting. Both mouths were open, small black caverns that exposed the ridge of gums and the small rounded mounds of the boy’s tongues. The eyes were open and hollow. Each plum-sized head was rimmed with a floating tuft of iron-colored hair.

There was something overwhelmingly sad about the boy.

I couldn’t identify what it was.

Robby said, “This isn’t right.”

I said, “I think I know exactly what it would be like to have two heads like that.”

The last wall contained specimens of bugs. But these weren’t any bugs I’d ever seen. They also floated inside sealed rectangular glass cases filled with preserving fluid. They looked almost like aquariums with alien creatures in them.

Some of the bugs in the tanks were as big as middle-school kids.

They looked like praying mantises, or grasshoppers maybe.

The larger tanks only contained parts of bugs: heads, appendages, thoraxes.

The heads were as large as mine and Robby’s.

The tanks were also labeled:

MCKEON INDUSTRIES 1969 UNSTOPPABLE SOLDIER—STRAND 4-VG-12

“We need to get out of here,” Robby said.

I agreed.

It was too late, though. Robby and I were trapped in Johnny McKeon’s office. Somebody was outside, in the main room of the shop.

They weren’t making any attempt to be quiet, either.

BLUE LIGHT

“OH, SHIT, AUSTIN.”

“Get the light,” I whispered.

Robby flicked the switch, but Johnny McKeon’s office didn’t go dark.

The glass globe with the pulsating black shit in it wriggled and burned with a blue light. It was like writhing cobalt embers trapped inside the sphere of the glass. The thing in the sphere, whatever it was, obviously responded to light.

Hiding was our only option, but there was no place inside Johnny’s office that was very suitable. Robby pointed at the desk. We pulled Johnny’s chair out and huddled together, hugging each other in the small rectangular space below the desk.

We were just like that poor two-headed boy floating in fluid in the jar.

We didn’t even think to lock Johnny’s office door behind us.

Why would anyone have thought to do such a thing?

Because it would have been smart, I told myself.

The knob on the door squeaked and turned. There were footsteps. Someone came into the office. I put my face down on the floor and looked from under the desk. There were several sets of feet there.

Someone said, “What the crap is that?”

The shoes were positioned so whoever was inside with me and Robby was looking at the mysterious globe.

“It’s alive,” another voice concluded.

“People always said Johnny McKeon kept weird shit in here. Maybe it’s an alien or something.”

Robby’s fingers squeezed around my arm. We both knew the voice. It was Grant Wallace. He and his boys had somehow gotten into From Attic to Seller.

“Let’s take that shit,” the kid named Tyler said.

“You’re carrying it. It looks heavy,” Grant said. “I don’t want that shit. I came for the booze. Let’s go.”

The Hoover Boys apparently found their way into the back room connecting Tipsy Cricket with the secondhand store. They probably broke into the abandoned foot doctor’s office to do it.

It was a simple matter.

For all anyone knew, Grant and his boys may have been planning their theft from Tipsy Cricket for a long time. It probably had everything to do with why we ran into them in Grasshopper Jungle earlier that day.

Technically, our encounter with Grant Wallace happened the day before, since it was solidly past midnight in our time zone, which was located under the desk in Johnny McKeon’s office.

“Is that a dick?” one of the boys asked.

“It’s a dick,” another concluded.

“Johnny Mack has a dick in a bottle in his office,” Grant affirmed.

“Maybe it’s his,” one of Grant’s friends said.

“Let’s take it,” another of them said.

“I’m not touching it. It’s a jar with a dick in it.” I think Tyler said that.

“Oh yeah,” someone else said. “And balls, too.”

“That’s sick. I’m not touching it. Hang on. I’m going to take a picture of that dick in a jar with my phone,” the videographer decided.

“Text it to me.” One of the Hoover Boys laughed.

I desperately wished they’d stop talking about the penis in the jar, but Grant and his friends were like lonely parakeets in front of a mirror.

Finally, after they’d exhausted all speculation and conversational rhetoric on the topic of penises in jars, the boys stood there numbly for a moment, apparently unable to detach their eyes. I heard the sound of something heavy and solid sliding on one of the shelves.

The blue shadows in the room swirled.

Tyler had lifted the globe.

It was not a good idea.

“Let’s go. I’m thirsty,” he said.

They left the door to Johnny’s office standing open.

The blue light danced away into the darkness of the back room, and then faded entirely.

I grabbed Robby’s wrist and pulled him out from our hiding place. Then I led him back through the shop and up the ladder to the roof.

PRIORITIES

ROBBY BREES AND I had our priorities.

As soon as we closed the hatch and were outside on the roof again, we lit cigarettes.

Smoking dynamos.

“Shit,” Robby said.

“Shit,” I agreed.

Shit, like the word okay, can mean any number of things. In fact, in the history I recorded in my book for that one Friday in Ealing, Iowa, I believe I used the word shit in every possible context.

I will have to go back through the history and check.

Robby and I said shit—nothing else—approximately eleven more times as we smoked our cigarettes up on the roof.

“What do you think that shit in the ball was?” Robby said.

“I don’t know. You read the nameplate on it. It said Contained Plague .”

“Nothing good is ever called Plague,” Robby said.

“Maybe it was just some glow-in-the-dark experimental stuff,” I said.

“I’ve done an experiment. We made a battery out of a lemon. Remember that?” Robby asked.

“Yes. It was a good experiment,” I agreed. I nodded like a scientist would. “We knew what was supposed to happen before we even started it. And it worked.”

“But I don’t think things called Plague are the subject of the kinds of experiments we do in the lab at Curtis Crane,” Robby said.

That’s what it was—what Robby and I had done up there on the roof at Grasshopper Jungle—I thought.

An experiment.

It is perfectly normal for boys to experiment. I read it somewhere that was definitely not in a book at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy. Or if it was in a book, it would certainly no longer be part of Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy’s library collection. Not after the shit I did in eighth grade.

Maybe I heard some psychologist who specialized in Teen Sexuality say shit about things like Boys experimenting on one of those afternoon talk shows that are only on television for the fulfillment of depressed and lonely women.

Depressed and lonely women need to know about Teen Sexuality and how it’s normal for boys to experiment. Normal. That’s what the psychologist would say. The psychologist also would have been a slim woman with nicely trimmed hair, a sincere and calming smile, and modest jewelry.

That was bullshit.

History shows that real experiments, like the one we did with the lemon, always involve some reasonable expectation ahead of time about the outcome. About how things will work out.

Robby slid the pack of cigarettes into the back pocket on his sagging jeans and we gathered up our flamingo, wine, grimacing lemur, and skateboards. We made our way down the ladder and onto the dumpster we’d rolled across Grasshopper Jungle.

“Don’t say anything to Shann,” I cautioned.

I didn’t need to tell Robby that. It was just one of those things boys do sometimes to confirm that there are secrets that shall be protected.

Robby said, “You mean about what we saw in her stepdad’s office, or what we did up on the roof ?”

I said, “Shit.”

I imagined I had two arguing and confused heads sprouting up from my shoulders.

I felt sadness for that other boy inside the jar in Johnny McKeon’s office.

HELL BREAKS LOOSE

SHANN WAS SLEEPING soundly in the backseat of Robby’s Ford Explorer when we came back to the car. She stretched out comfortably, with her head lying on some crumpled socks and a pair of Robby’s boxers that had fire trucks and Dalmatians on them.

Watching Shann sleep made me horny.

I was all messed up.

I thought I probably needed to talk to someone about how sexually confused I felt. I couldn’t talk to Robby about it, not after what we did on the roof. I thought, but only for half a second, about talking to Pastor Roland Duff. But I already felt guilty as it was.